Breeding Plumage Willet
I had a couple of mornings to hit the beach while on vacation last June at Daytona Beach. Willets were about the only wading species I ran across. I know the crop is a little tight(there is no crop). I should have left my 1.4X TC at home. I was out as far as I felt safe in the surf and these birds were more accommodating than I was expecting. Most of my images were even tighter than this one.
Nikon D500/500mmF4VRII/TC-14EIII
F8, 1/1000s, iso500
Hi Jack. Details look nice and I like him wading in the water. I did the following to the image
Added canvas all around as it is too tight in the frame. Then did content aware fills and a tiny bit of cloning. Also leveled the shot.
Toned the blues down and warmed up the image a bit.
Did a strong highlight adjustment as the whites were almost all hot on my monitor. I also lowered the brightness a little and lowered the contrast a little as well.
Resized the file, then did some light NR on the background and a small sharpening (.2 and 40) to adjust for the downsizing
Just an idea of where you can take an image like this and of course any of these adjustments are best done on the original file. I didn't take the time to make sure the whites were perfect, etc. Just really wanted you to see that you can work with files if they are too tight. If you need specifics on how any of this was done please ask.
Last edited by Isaac Grant; 11-28-2017 at 09:28 PM.
Thanks for the feedback Isaac. I need to recheck my monitor at home as the whites do look hotter on my work monitor. This is an image that lends itself to being opened up due to the relatively uniform BG. I'll have to admit I'm more of a square head technician than artist. I've been using Steve Perry's Photoshop actions for posting to the web. There's still quite a bit of feather detail lost in these compressed images.
Don't know Steve Perry (unless you mean the ex lead singer of Journey). But if you are losing details than you are doing something wrong. You need to resize the image and then sharpen. Not the other way around. Artie and Arash have a fantastic guide on this that may be worth purchasing. Details every step of the way. Also please see my explanation in the recent picture of a black bellied Plover that was posted re the way to post.
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